Bill generation is probably the most important activity within society accounting on a monthly basis. The accountants / managers generally have to invest a considerable amount of time due to the complexities involved in calculating values for all the houses within the society. The usual use case may include –
- Area and rate based billing for maintenance
- Unit consumption based billing for utility (electricity and water)
- Slab based billing if the electricity provider dictates it
- GST exemption above Rs 7500 for maintenance
- Previous penalty inclusion within the bill and more
- E-Invoice generation for B2B house
While all of the above can easily be automated through Mygate, it is always better to recheck the item values post the invoices have been generated!
Until now, Mygate has been offering an invoice ‘Preview’ feature which helps the admin confirm the design, values and format of bills one house at a time.
This preview tool has always been super useful in improving the confidence level of the admin before billing. However, the limited nature of this option does not allow verification of invoice amounts in bulk for all houses.
To enhance the ERP experience and reduce the nervousness of our users, we have introduced a new invoicing flow in addition to the older one – ‘Generate (Publish Later)’.
Using this new method provides the admins with the following benefits:
- The bills get generated as usual, but DO NOT GET PUBLISHED TO THE RESIDENTS right away. This ensures that there is still a chance for review before people start making payments against their invoices.
- Given that the invoices get fully generated in the backend, the admin can safely use the following reports for a bulk verification –
- Bill excel download from Invoice History
- Bill PDFs download from the Invoice History
- Invoiced values along with house opening & closing from the MIS Report
- Final due values of each house from the Dues Report
- If there is a correction needed to the new created bills, the admin can –
- Safely delete (reverse) the whole invoice batch before generating a fresh set. This is advisable if there are issues in a good number of bills
- Pass credit notes if only a few houses have issues.
Once the admin is satisfied with the generated invoice batch, he can PUBLISH these bills to the residents from the familiar Invoice History page.
Ideally, both generation and publish operations should be completed by the society office within the same day. However, even if the admin forgets to trigger that latter, the system will publish the pending batches on their respective due dates (at 10pm).
*Other important points to note:
- Settlement from existing advance only triggers after the invoices have been published to the residents. This is not done before to ensure that the system does not have to delete extra entries if the whole batch is faulty.
- E-Invoice generation only triggers after the invoices have been published to the residents. The same reason as above applies here as well. Hence, you will be able to view the QR Codes on bill with IRN numbers only after the publish operation.
- Invoices cannot be sent to residents via Emails or SMS/Push Notifications until they are published.
- Residents will have a visibility of the unpublished invoice’s total amount in the app. This appears as a read-only figure under ‘Total Dues’ within the Society Dues module. Payment against this value is, however, not permitted!
The old invoice generation method has not been removed and will continue as it it under the name ‘Generate (Publish Now)’.